The boat-building prowess of Curly Phillips

Coming out of the woods of northern Ontario, Donald “Curly” Phillips, like many of those living in Jasper – then called Fitzhugh – was drawn west by the promise of adventure on a relatively untouched frontier.  

Born in Dorset, Ontario, April 15, 1884, Curly spent his formative years paddling, portaging, guiding and trapping in the Lake of Bays and Temagami regions, honing those skills out of both necessity and enjoyment.  Adept with the tools of his trade, an axe and knife, Curly built the canoes he paddled, the axes he swung, the snowshoes he ambled in and toboggans he hauled.  

His town of birth, Dorset, still stands today, a hub of activity in the summer months for the weekend fair-weather cottagers and the outdoorsy, heading to Algonquin Park and even farther north to Temagami, traveling the same canoe routes that Curly explored as a boy.  Dorset also happens to have one of the finest frozen yogurt joints east of the Athabasca River.    

Settling in Jasper in 1912, Curly took to guiding wealthy tourists along the tributaries of the Athabasca and Peace Rivers.  “Never outliving his love of water travel, he preferred this to transportation by horses, and spent his later years building the tidy freight canoes and power launches” used for exploration in the area, wrote Dr. J. Monroe Thorington, the man, at Curly’s behest, who was charged with taking care of his diaries.

Many of Curly’s cedar formed creations are still around today.  Recently, a representative of Maligne Tours, who asked not to be named, spent “100 man hours or so,” restoring a freight canoe that was hauled up to Maligne in the spring of 1923.  Requiring quite a bit of prep work, because the boat was “kinda like a piece of spaghetti,” the boat now lies in the Maligne Tours office in town.  

Originally the haul was canvassed over, which was the traditional material of the period, but the boat is now fibreglassed and clearcoated, so that people can really see all the lines of the vessel.  Due to rotting, “about six inches” had to be taken off the stern and a new ash transom was fitted.  

The boathouse out at Maligne Lake today was also constructed by Curly for his tour business.  “He was extremely proficient at building anything pertaining to the great outdoors.  He built all the boats for his concession on Maligne Lake,” wrote C. Vern Jeffery in 1974, who had served as Curly’s best man at his wedding to Grace Isabelle Inkster.  

Growing disillusioned with the tourism business by 1928, due to costs, not to mention the onset of the Great Depression a couple years later – which drastically reduced the number of wealthy Americans looking for a taste of adventure in the Rockies – Curly “turned instead to building up his boat business,” wrote William C. Taylor, his self-proclaimed biographer.  

Perhaps nobody could encapsulate Curly’s affinity for wooden boats more than Curly himself.  Writing in Forest and Stream in Feb. 1930, he wrote, “they can talk all they like about airplanes, and Graf Zeppelins, but I, for one, don’t hold with this craze to get off the earth.  It strikes me as being a kind of superiority complex as if the old earth wasn’t good enough... I did 1,150 miles in one of them [canoes] this summer, and I wouldn’t exchange that trip for the best trip you can name in anything that goes on wings, or wheels for that matter... give me to the water every time.”  

Killed by an avalanche on Mar. 22, 1938, Curly’s death prompted a reexamination of avalanche response search and recovery operations in the Park.  

For more information on Donald “Curly” Phillips, please visit the Jasper Yellowed Museum & Archives.  Special thanks to archives manager Meghan Power for assisting with research for this piece.